Her Former Self
by Gokitalo
Summary: A young woman finds herself in a dire predicament when something in everyone's favorite computer simulation goes horribly wrong...


Her Former Self

 _(NOTE: A friend of mine inspired me to write this by showing me this prompt from Free Flying Press:_ _"Over time, she came to the realization she was no longer made of substance, but something more like a shadow...")_

She didn't know why she was running. Each bullet that struck her merely went right through, leaving cracks in the concrete. Yet a part of her knew shooting her wasn't the only thing they could try to do to her.

It had started a few weeks ago. Melanie Carey thought she was dreaming the day she saw her hand pass through the coffee pot— an assumption quickly shattered when she finally did manage to grab hold of the handle and accidentally spill hot liquid on her leg. Her jeans kept her skins from burning, but she had felt the heat.

She chalked it up to a daydream. Until two days later, when she tried to turn the doorknob of her front door to head out to work. Same thing as with the coffee mug: hand went right through. It took almost five minutes it decided it wanted to be tangible again. She almost screamed when, in one attempt, her hand slipped through the door.

It started to become a problem at the office, too. She struggled to type on the keyboard. Sometimes she would try sitting in her chair and end up on the floor. She'd try to convince herself she'd missed, until she noticed the top half of her head was sticking out of the seat. Thankfully, her cubicle walls managed to hide most of these episodes.

Until, of course, the day she phased down two floors.

Melanie thought she was going crazy. Yet her nearby coworkers swore they saw her fall through the ceiling. She tried to laugh it off, but it wasn't enough to make the looks and slacked jaws go away.

Her friends at work began to notice her worry. A number of them started asking her one day if she was feeling alright: she was looking a bit pale, they all said. It wasn't until her next bathroom break that she realized what they had meant. Only Melanie wasn't becoming pale at all. She was becoming…

Translucent.

She immediately went into her boss' office and asked for sick leave. Stress, she said. No doubt noticing her concern and "paling" complexion, he agreed. She left her car in the parking lot and walked home: she was too afraid a part of her body would slip through the break, accelerator or steering wheel. Maybe right out of the vehicle entirely.

When she got to her apartment, Melanie broke down in tears. She tried calling her parents, but couldn't dial on the keypad. Maybe it was for the best, she thought. What could she possibly tell them? That she was slowly… what WAS she going through? Was she vanishing? Becoming a ghost? A ghost can't be alive, can it?

That night she didn't eat dinner. She couldn't even touch the leftover lasagna, much less eat it. With resignation, she went to bed. A part of her had just wanted to sleep on the couch, but if she fell through it and solidified, she'd be trapped and/or dead. At least if she ended up under the bed, she could crawl out.

Melanie never fell through anything after that. For that, she was thankful. Yet she kept disappearing. Every day, her body became a little more see-through. Touching things was growing increasingly difficult. After day three, she'd given up on eating or drinking. Couldn't humans only go three days without water? She thought she'd heard that somewhere. Although weirdly enough… her thirst, as well as her appetite, seemed to only grow smaller.

A week and two days. The phone calls started coming in, all unanswered. Her mom and dad, checking in. Her boss, asking if she was feeling better and when she'd think she'd be back to work. Mel still hadn't left the apartment. She could hardly see herself in the mirror anymore. She lied down on the couch and cried for what felt like the millionth time. She was going to disappear, she thought. Vanish without a trace from the Earth. As sunlight creeped through her window, she looked at the floor and noticed something peculiar.

She could still see her shadow. Clear as always. What did that mean? Was it just taking longer to vanish? Or did that mean the effect of whatever she had were starting to wear off?

After ten minutes, Mel sat up. It was the faintest glimmer of hope, but it was something. She stood and began to walk toward the door, each step quicker than the last. She slipped right through it and into the hallway, where she began to run. She paid no attention to the people gawking at what was left of her. She was NOT going to go gently into the night, like that one poet (Faulkner, was it?) had said. The first thing she planned to do was go to her parents' home and tell them everything. She didn't worry about them not believing her: the evidence would literally be staring them right in the face. They lived twenty minutes away from her… by car. Yet Melanie didn't care. She'd walk to the top of Kilimanjaro if they lived there.

Roughly ten minutes into her walk, Melanie realized she was being followed.

"Melanie Carey?" one of the three men in black suits and sunglasses asked. "Can we speak with you? It'll only take a moment."

Something wasn't right. How did they know who she was? How were they not fazed by her appearance? She turned her head and saw one of them pull out a badge. Mel stopped. Were they FBI? Maybe they knew what was going on. Maybe they could help. Or maybe they were here to cover up some weird government plot that made her this way. Or was that more the CIA's M.O.?

"Y-y-yes?" said Melanie, turning around.

"I'm Agent Brown," the first man to pull out his badge said. The other two followed suit. "These are Agent Jones and Johnson. We're here because we understand you have a problem."

"Yes!" Melanie she walked towards them, clasping her hands forward eagerly, not even bothering to keep them from phasing through each other. "Yes, please! I-I don't know what's been going on with me lately, but—" she swallowed the rest of her sentence as all three agents pulled out a gun.

"I'm afraid you're posing a bit of a problem," Brown explained. Melanie put her hands out in front of her, flinching, screaming and squeezing her bottle-green eyes shut simultaneously as she heard the first gunshot. When she heard the next eleven, she opened her eyelids and lowered her arms. Every shot was dead on target. Yet they had all gone right through her body. When the three agents had emptied their clips, they paused for a moment and looked at each other.

"We're too late," Agent Jones said, his voice a gravelly bass.

"She is further along than the others," Brown concurred, "but she's still not fully gone yet. Keep shooting and stay on her."

If Melanie knew for a fact that she would stay intangible the whole time, she could have just stayed still and laughed the bullets off. But she DIDN'T know, and she knew better than to take that chance. So she turned away and ran as if her life depended on it. Which was hoping it didn't.

As it turned out, fleeing from them was a cinch. She felt almost weightless. Bullets continued to pass through her harmlessly: so far, so good. Regardless, the three men followed her with the utmost persistence, none of them seeming to tire. In fact, neither did Melanie. Normally she would be working up a sweat at this point.

"Agent Johnson, send a report to mainframe," Agent Brown said mid-run. "Inform them of the situation."

"Understood," Johnson nodded, pushing his finger against one of the earpieces that each of them carried. Before Johnson could take further action, his body slammed in into the pavement, knocked down by a man who had fallen on him from at least thirty stories up. And who had landed not only on his feet… but completely unharmed.

"YOU," Agent Brown hissed. He turned his gun on the newcomer, only to have it knocked out of his arms in a series of martial arts moves that would even make Bruce Lee blink. Johnson's own piece flew out of his hands, kicked away by the back of the stranger's boot. Melanie stopped running and looked back to see a dark-haired man in a long, black trench coat taking the two agents on in hand-to-hand.

"Hey," she heard a husky voice say behind her. "Don't mind him: he's just showing off." Melanie turned and saw a short-haired woman dressed in a similar leather trench coat to that of the man attacking the agents.

"Who—" Melanie began.

"Later," the black-clad woman said. "We have to get you out of here. Come with me." Hesitantly, Melanie followed her into an alley that was mostly barren, save for an old payphone.

"Good thing you weren't too hard to find," the woman continued. "We just followed the gunshot sounds and the only thing that's still left of you." She looked down at the ground.

"Only thing that…" Melanie followed her savior's gaze and again saw her shadow. She gasped and looked at her hands. Or, more accurately, FOR her hands.

"Wh-wh-wh-wh-what—"

"You're the tenth case we've heard of so far," the black-clad woman said. "And if we're fast enough, the first one we'll save."

"What do you mean?!" Melanie said. "What happened to the others?!"

"THEY got to them."

Melanie gasped. If she could have cupped her mouth with her hands in that moment, she would have.

"I'll make this quick," the woman continued. "My name is Trinity. The man who's fighting the Agents right now is Neo. And you are a glitch."

"A glitch?" Melanie repeated. "What do you mean a 'glitch'?

"A glitch in the system," Trinity explained. "I hate to do it this way— we're not even SUPPOSED to free adults, but— we don't have any other choice. This ISN'T the world you think it is. It's completely fake. A computer system meant to enslave humanity."

Under any other circumstance, Melanie would have dismissed Trinity's revelation as crazy-talk. Yet it seemed the whole world had gone crazy with her.

"It's called the Matrix," continued Trinity. "And recently, the… SYSTEMS who run it tried to install an upgrade. A minor update that would fix a few bugs. But what it mainly did was create a new one. A small group of people in the system have been disappearing: fading away, just like you. They never disappear completely. They just slowly vanish until only one thing is left... usually their shadow. They tried fixing it with a patch— if you were falling through the floor before, that's how THAT got fixed. But it wasn't enough to stop the rest of the process."

"S-so my body is gone?" Trinity asked.

"Not your REAL body," Trinity said. "What you thought was your body is just your avatar. Your REAL body is in the REAL world." She reached into the pockets of her trench coat and pulled out two small pills. "I want to take you there. But I'm not sure I can."

"What are those…?" Melanie asked.

Trinity sighed. "I don't even know why I'm holding out the red one. Whenever we meet someone we want to pull out from the Matrix, we're always supposed to give them a choice. If they take the blue pill, they stay in the system. If they take the red one, we wake them up in the real world. But I'm not sure what we're able to do if you aren't able to take either."

Had Melanie still a heart, it would have sunk at that moment.

"So… that's it?" she asked, sobbing slightly. "You saved me to tell me… I can't be saved?"

"Morpheus— you don't know him, but if we get you out of this, you will— has a theory. He thinks there might be one way to bypass the glitch: desire."

"Desire?"

"The Matrix is just a computer program," Trinity explained. "It has no gravity or air. Nothing in this place is real. People like Neo, Morpheus and me have learned to control our 'cyber-selves.' We can break the system's rules. And maybe you can too."

"How?" Melanie asked. "I'm still getting over the fact that none of this is even real! I mean, it makes so much sense, but…!"

"You have to want it, Melanie," said Trinity. "More than anything. WILL your 'body' back into existence. Technically, it's still there, invisible and intangible: that's why you can 'see' and 'talk.' You're just missing the part that everyone ELSE can see."

"Okay… I think I got it. Make myself reappear, right?"

"Exactly."

"Got it. Do you mind if I talk to myself if I do it?"

"Whatever you need."

Melanie began chanting to herself again and again. "I want to reappear, I want to reappear, I want to reappear, I want to reappear…" she felt like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and more than a little silly. Yet her desperation soon overpowered her embarrassment.

"It's working!" Trinity told her. Melanie felt the muscles on her face pull back into a smile, meaning they had returned. Her success increased her confidence, and sure enough, a body began to become visible above her shadow.

"I want you to touch your palms with your fingers until they no longer go through," Trinity instructed. "When they don't, tell me."

Melanie nodded with her reappeared head. At that moment, an elderly, bearded homeless man in dirty old clothes walking by stopped to look at her and Trinity.

"Ah, 'scuse me," he said. "Any of you ladies could a spare a quaarrrrrrrrrr—" Melanie gasped as the man's features began to stretch out and move around like Play-Doh.

"Neo must've killed one of the Agents," Trinity said. "Melanie, you have to hurry!"

"O-o-okay!" Melanie scrunched her eyebrows and focused harder. She suddenly realized her fingers could feel the palm of her hand. "Trinity, I think I'm ready!" Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the homeless man was gone. In his place was Agent Johnson, who was reaching for the handgun in his holster.

"Alright!" Trinity speedily held out both pills again. "Make your decision!" Melanie grabbed the red pill, using her saliva to push it down her throat. The world before her eyes began to fade. When she could no longer see it, her body disappeared completely from the Matrix… shadow included. The last thing Melanie heard was the sound of gunfire.

* * *

"She's waking up."

Melanie squinted as her eyes took in the artificial light from the lamps above. She was on a gurney, with Neo and Trinity watching her, only now they wore much simpler, older clothes. A third man watched over her, as well.

"You handled the shock better than most," he told Melanie. "Even Neo could learn from you."

"Are you… Morpheus?" Melanie asked.

"Yes," he told her. "And you're Melanie. At least that's what they called you… in there. But you are free from the Matrix now. You may pick a new name, different than the one your captors gave you, if you wish."

"I, uh… I kinda liked Melanie," she replied. "But if I have to pick a new name, I guess it could be… 'Shadow?"

"Then welcome, Shadow," Morpheus said. "To the real world. Where no one can disappear."


End file.
